I would have anticipated more entries for rugby or Aussie rules football. These guys play full-contact with no equipment!
Not unless there’s some weird American variant, which I wouldn’t rule out. They may have been trying to train the juves to stay in some kind of assigned positions, of course; but in soccer anyone can go anywhere. Goalkeepers can’t use their hands outside of their own 18-yard box, so they tend not to wander too much. On the other hand, the attacking role formerly fulfilled by wing-forwards tends to be carried out by wing-backs these days, in additional to wing defence, so they can cover a mighty lot of ground.
To set against the unprotected state of Aussie footballers and Rugby players, there are rules limiting what you can do to someone - you can’t tackle a Rugby player who hasn’t got the ball, for instance, and except at a scrum or line-out you can’t touch any opponent; there’s no blocking or anything like that. On the other hand, the front-row forwards in a scrum have a lot of force coming onto their necks and shoulders - upwards of 1600 pounds pushing against an equal and opposite.
Can anyone expound on the flow of pro rugby?
How long is a season? How many games? How much time between games?
How long does a game last?
How much running do you do in a game? How much down-time is there?
Do players switch in and out like NFL football? (defense and offense)
Is there a difference between Aussie and English rugby?
A top defenceman will typically average a bit under 30 minutes a night. A top forward, on the other hand will be around 22 minutes and maybe as high as 24.
Also, hockey players are basically expected to be sprinting for their entire shift. This makes hockey very different from most other sports – instead needing the endurance to play long stretches of time, you need to be able to sprint for 30 seconds or so, rest up for a couple minutes, and do it all over again,
Players have been known to push 100 MPH – but I’m not sure if anybody actually hits that speed during a game.
I played organized rugby for a couple of months while living overseas, and I came away a bit unimpressed - it’s not near as violent as I had expected. Direct collisions between players running at full speed are rare. Counter that with some NFL games - the Super Bowl last night was played in a driving rain, that made footing difficult, and it wasn’t necessarily a ‘hard-hitting’ game - but there were at least a dozen hits that made grown men wince.
That rugby players don’t wear much safety equipment is less because they’re manly men, and much more because they don’t really need it.
When this type of discussion arises, I like to dream up a scenario where top teams from the different sports trade off playing each other in there respective games. So, take whichever soccer team won the World Cup, and put them in an (American) football game against the Super Bowl winner. Then have them play a soccer match. I’m sure the NFL players would be a bit winded after playing soccer, but at least a few soccer players would come off the field on a stretcher. It would actually be dangerous for the soccer players to try.
That doesn’t necessarily prove anything about which sport is more grueling. Both sports feature incredibly gifted athletes who train their whole lives for totally different types of physical effort. I think we need a clear definition of grueling to make a valid judgement about which is the most grueling.
Doesn’t it just boggle your mind that hockey players didn’t use to wear helmets or masks? Even goalies only started in 1959 with the first goalie mask worn by Jacques Plante. I can remember watching some hockey in the 80s with the players still not wearing helmets, long locks flowing in the breeze.
Does boxing count, or are we just talking about team sports here?
Boxing and ultimate fighting are sort of a different ball of wax.
They’re definitely damaging, but to call it “grueling”, there probably has to be some kind of obligation to perform. If the “schedule” is getting too tough for a fighter, he can just take a few more months off.
As gets made more and more evident by stories like Ted Johnson’s that came out last week, boxer’s health tends to be a bit more closely scrutinized than your average NFL player. A boxer gets KO’ed and he can’t fight again for a while.
If an NFL player suffers a concussion, he’s back in the game. Back in practice. No rest.
Again, it gets back to what you really mean by grueling.
Actually, there’s plenty of ex-footballers hobbling around on knees shot to pieces. Damaged ligaments are among the most common soccer injuries - often a player will recover enough to continue with their career, but at the expense of the prospect of them holding out into middle age. However, many of the injuries described in the Bettis article would be (and are) career-ending ones, simply because nobody in that state could perform adequately on the pitch. And I’m not sure that a sport enabling somebody to return to the game after numerous serious injuries actually makes it ‘gruelling’, just that the characteristics of the game enable them to do so.
Much of the comparison is with football/soccer, although their schedule is nothing like that of the top Premiership teams. Matches are 80 minutes, and most players are on the pitch for the whole time. No major breaks in play (less than in football, I think). And the athleticism is similar, being on the move for most of the game with some sprints.
Just to add also that when play stops in hockey, so does the clock. When play starts again, the clock does too. This doesn’t occur in some sports (for example, football), where the clock can continue to run even when play has stopped and/or the referee is performing some official function that would require the clock’s stoppage in hockey.
When we speak of a hockey player playing for 30 minutes or 24 minutes, it is important to note that the player is playing for that amount of time. He is not playing only for, say, ten minutes out of the 30 or 24 he spends on the ice. He’s likely out there longer. The starting and stopping of the hockey clock in accordance with play means that we can easily track a player’s minutes in actual play.
I thought you were going with this one.
Anyway, you’re all going on about the need to run for 20-40 minutes, or play an 82 game season. There’s a reason that the NFL season is only 16 weeks, and that they only play once a week:
Because it’s friggin’ grueling!!!
I’ll tell ya another grueling sport: professional bull riding.
I’ve watched events at the end of the season, and I’m not exaggerating to say that every single of them is injured or has been injured during the season.
There was a guy a couple years ago riding in the finals with a broken leg. They tear elbow ligaments, shoulders, take head injuries, leg injuries, back and neck injuries. It’s almost comical to hear the announcers go over each guy’s injuries as it’s their turn.
It’s a long season too with a lot of travel to shitty places.
I think everyone’s using different definitions of “grueling,” though. I was surprised anyone suggested football as the most grueling because I perceived “Grueling” as being something other than what you seem to. It strikes me as obvious that football injures its participants because it’s DANGEROUS, not grueling.
“Grueling” implies, to me, a sort of continuous, gradual breakdown of the body, where the body falls apart more due to fatigue and constant little irritations and injuries - not the sudden, devastating impacts of periodic injury that typify pro football, a sport wherein players might play, at the absolute most, seven minutes a week. Seven minutes a week isn’t “grueling,” the way I’d assume the word to mean.
It boggles my mind that some players still don’t wear visors. Not wearing a helmet is completely beyond my comprehension.
I cast my vote for “javelin catching.”
I was thinking more along the lines of what RickJay said when I used the term “grueling.” That is why I put the schedule info right at the top there.
Cycling…seems grueling as hell. But how often does one race? Once or twice a year? (Those are not rhetorical questions - I need ignorance fought). Same with cross-country skiing.
Someone pointed out boxing. Also grueling and I would say moreso than NFL football but as someone has already pointed out, it’s not something you do full-on every day.
I am still thinking soccer and hockey are up there because of their schedules. Someone said 40 games over the same period as hockey’s 82 (6 months?) That would give hockey the edge, to me, because there’s twice as many games in the same period - less time to rest.
Of course, I am open to discussion over what I mean by grueling. If you put an NFL football team out there on the same schedule as an MLB team it would be the most grueling sport ever conceived. But that’s not the case. Soccer and hockey, though, have a little less than the games over the same time period as baseball yet the players are playing 10x as hard or more.
Okay, this post made me reconsider javelin catching, although I contend that would be the winner if it were real.
I’d have to cast my vote for most grueling sport for traditional Muay Thai in Thailand, or Burmese Lethwai. Western fighters can and do take off for extended periods of time between fights, but Muay Thai fighters in Thailand train for 6+ hours a day, 6+ days a week, fight as often as every two or three weeks for years on end, and end up retiring by 26 or 27.
Not to start a my football is better than yours argument, but I think Rugby League is tougher and demands more stamina than NFL.
For those not in the know, a game runs for 80 minutes, and that’s pretty much constant for the entire time. There is a 20 min half time break, and a break of maybe 2-3 mins after a team scores a try (touchdown) while the golakicker attempts to convert the try. (sort of like the point after, but the kicker is allowed his attempt without interference).
There are 13 players on the field with 4 reserves on the bench. A team is allowed to sub players 8 times during the game. All the players on the pitch are pretty much constantly moving. There ar two types of players on the field - Forwards, think linebackers, and Backs, think Running Backs & Receivers.
The forwards are subject to constant full body contact, against other big forwards, in primarily front-on collisions, often at full speed.
IT’s a bit of a furffy to say no pads, as most forwards wear basic soft shoulder pads. However these shoulder pads are soft material things that simply cushion the blow not hard plastic pads like the NFL ones.
As to the season it is around 28 games, playing every weekend, and the top players play a further 3 games of “State of Origin” football during the season, State of Origin is a step up in intensity over normal games, and depending upon the year they may also play in 3-5 international test matches, which are considered harder than club football but not yet up to State of Origin standard.
All games are played in open air, in prevailing weather conditions, be that rain or hail, I didn’t say snow becasue excluding a single excpetion in 100 odd years of the game, snow has never been a factor.
Were you playing League or Union? I used to play both. The tackling tends to be a lot harder in League, where the overriding tactic is to try and punch through a defence, whereas this would leave you stranded and unable to recycle the ball in Union.